Buy your own dinosaur for only £600,000

In order to get your hands on the dinosaur you’ll need a spare £600,000… and a very large warehouse (Picture: AP)

If you are among millions of visitors to have been captivated by the Diplodocus skeleton that dominates the central hall of the Natural History Museum, then this auction could be for you.

Dinosaur enthusiasts are being offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy a fully-intact skeleton of the prehistoric giant that would even trump the famous London museum, which only displays a cast.

All but the very rich will be priced out, however, with the specimen, 17m (55ft) long and 6m (19ft) tall, expected to fetch up to £600,000 when it is auctioned next month.

The 150million-year-old skeleton, nicknamed Misty, is thought to be the first-ever of a large dinosaur to be put up for sale.

It was found almost completely intact in a quarry in Wyoming, in the US, by the young sons of palaeontologist Raimund Albersdoerfer, in 2009.

He had sent Benjamin and Jacob, aged 14 and 11, away to another area to ‘get them off his back’, but they later returned to say they had found an enormous bone.

After being removed, the skeleton was painstakingly removed in the Netherlands before being assembled in the UK.

The giant herbivore is dusted off ahead of next month’s auction (Picture: BNPS)

‘There are probably about six of these in the great museums of the world, including in Pittsburgh and Washington,’ he said.

‘You are talking about a very rare item indeed. Even if you were lucky enough to find one in the first place, the digging out and the preparation then involved is an enormous undertaking.

‘The rock that it was embedded in would have been extremely hard to break away from the bones, and you couldn’t go at it with a sledge-hammer because the bones were vulnerable to breaking.’

Mr Fuller said he expected the skeleton to end up in a museum in Asia, or possibly in a private collection.

‘If I was a rich man, I could actually have a fossil dinosaur… that would impress my friends much more than a Ferrari and it would cost me just a fraction of £18million,’ he said alluding to a recent supercar auction.

‘That is really incredibly cheap if you compare it with a collector’s car and you’ve got a much more spectacular, gob-smacking exhibition.’